Past Quotes
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Art is for entertainment purposes, but it's also to reflect our dreams, our hopes, the present, the future the past - whether it's good or bad.
The goal ever recedes from us. The greater the progress the greater the recognition of our unworthiness. Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory.
People spend thousands in therapy digging and digging in the past. When you dig and dig, you find relics. Try to forgive yourself and get back on that ride.
I can forgive a man’s past faults, his present shortcomings, and his future failures if every minute of every day he loves me like it’s his religion.
It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.
I believe abortion should be available to everyone, but the law should be changed. In the past I voted for a restriction to 22 weeks, and I would be prepared to go down to 20.
Many French directors, having now realised there was no more real criticism, that the standards of the past have gone, are very offended about the quality of film criticism.
Dogs, for a reason that can only be described as divine, have the ability to forgive, let go of the past, and live each day joyously. It's something the rest of us strive for.
It's really good to be able to think about past loves without having a pit in my stomach, or cringing or feeling heart-broken, or like they hate you. Don't you think?
I write songs about stuff that I can't really get past personally - and then I write a song about it and I feel better.
After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.
To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.
Typically what happens is, somebody drags an idea from the past that worked in an old set of logics that they try to apply to the new one. And it doesn't work.
Biology has tended to be an observational science and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past but I hate to predict the future on that.
And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.
But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.
Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.
The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.
Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.
You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.
Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men.
The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You've got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.
The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.
Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.
The past stands in the path of the future, knowing it will be crushed.
I turned to music originally because of my past and needing a release or an outlet to get out anger or frustration or hurt.
It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. All there is ever, is the now.
I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.
Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.
Perspective is a kind of mental sunblock that, provided we apply it properly, prevents us from getting burned by past mistakes.
We care too much about what happens to be there as a result of history. I worry even more that we care too much for the past and not enough for the present and the near present.
